


Unexpected

by breathless_bisous



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Haymitch/Effie if you squint, In which Effie is OOC but I don't even care anymore, No Beta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-26
Updated: 2014-05-26
Packaged: 2018-01-26 16:25:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,978
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1694810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathless_bisous/pseuds/breathless_bisous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn't think they have anything else they can do when the children die, but drink and cry, and she’s just tired now. Too tired to cry, too tired to drink, to tired to do anything but sit there and talk with him, leaning up against him, spent and used up and feeling cold.</p>
<p>Or Effie and Haymitch and the progression of their relationship</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unexpected

She learned quickly not to get too attached to him. The drinking made sure that she never saw more of him then strictly necessary, and the anger behind his eyes meant whenever she did see him, he would stumble and fall and scare the children, so she learned to keep them away from him, learned to make sure they were happy going to their deaths. At first, there were no desserts, but she went down to the kitchens, her mouth set and her eyebrows low so that the meringue would float in at the end of their day. She knows after the second year that most of those children watch her cautiously with scared, empty eyes, looking wider on wan faces. They have never seen such color, such brightness since her last visit, and she wants desperately to make sure they are bright when they have to face the others. Every once in a while, a child comes along who is shaped of soldiers, their wiry strength giving her hope.

They never live past the second day.

She never stops caring though, and she bullies Haymitch towards sponsors and gifts, and interviews, and eventually they reach a tumultuous continuum of her shouting and him drinking and between the two they feel safe. The Capitol monitors their rooms, she is certain, but the children can say whatever they like-they are going to their deaths anyway. And Haymitch has nothing to lose-they can not kill a victor, and even if they could, he would probably welcome it. That scares her, but not as much as the bugs she can feel, even in her sleep, making sure she never thinks less than exemplary thoughts of the glittering world she was raised in.

One night, she dreams of spiders. They cover her body, and she can not move, but their legs skitter across her, quiet and terrifying and she shakes but they never let go. The smell of roses is choking her, and she coughs, but she can't scream, she can't, she can't because the spiders will know and the spiders will tell, and so she bolts awake in the night, covered in sweat and praying desperately that she didn't say a word to the empty room.

After that, she grows more careful in what she lets the tributes and Haymitch say. One girl is angry and screaming, and tearing apart the apartment and Haymitch, _damn him_ , is goading her on, happy to have someone else to tear at the chinks in their armor with him, gulping his whiskey until is streams down his neck, and the boy is huddled in the other room, rocking back and forth, crying and singing softly to himself and Effie could scream, but the spiders are always there, so she barks out orders to Haymitch, snaps at the girl, who screams right back, until they're standing on opposite sides of the room, and spittle is flying out of the tribute's mouth and she's red and Effie's red and then she smacks this girl, as hard as she can across the face, and she knows it's cruel, but there's no need for the girl's family to die just because she must, but she shuts up, apparently to surprised at Effie's total loss of control to speak anymore, and she glares at Haymitch as she comforts the boy and when they both die at the Cornucopia she sobs.

He doesn't look at her for a week after that.

When they return to District Twelve her duties are officially over, but she stays behind, insists on cleaning his house from top to bottom until everything smells of lemons. He doesn't know what that smell is, and she realizes no one in District Twelve had lemonade as children, and she cries some more. But when the time comes for her to leave, she turns to him, serious, her heels making her his height, and she tells him that if he lets the spiders near her or the children again she will make sure it's the last time he speaks.

The next year he doesn't drink, and he doesn't speak about the Capitol at all-he makes the children stronger, and they almost make it to the second night when a group of Careers take the boy in the dusk and the girl dies at the hands of her allies. He drinks after that, so much so she's afraid he has killed himself, but apparently she was wrong when she said he was ready for death, because he fights to waking in a cold, clean hospital room, and when he gasps to life she cries again.

"You've got to stop doing that" he mutters, and it's the first time he admits he cares at all, and bright spots light up her cheeks, and she kisses his forehead and tells hims not to be stupid. The red red red of her lipstick looks silly on his head, where bleary grey eyes struggle to see her face, but she doesn't care because at least he's alive and awake now.

She starts fixing his house every time the Games end now. She makes sure no one else knows she's in the District, but his house always smell of lemons, and he always has to search for a week before he can find where she hid all the drink.

The spiders find her in her dreams again, and she walks, barefoot and feeling naked without her make-up and wig, but she walks to his room, and curls up beside him, and sometimes she leaves before he wakes but sometimes she opens her eyes and her face is against his chest and his arm is around her, and his heartbeat feels strong and steady against her cheek and she thinks it might be the closest he can come to saying he wants her safe and happy.

 

When the sun finally rose, dripping with rose-gold light, hoisting itself over the horizon, she watched it from the roof. If his eyes-magnified by the light of the sun-blinked once too many, she would not tell.

Often, after the children had died, they would make their way up here, breathe in hot, steamy, midsummer air, thicker from the haze of so many people, so many buildings. Her shoes, bright things that pinched her feet, would be discarded and she would pull out the bottle of wine-white, clear and tart-and they would have a picnic. It was unexpected, this shared grief turned camaraderie, but she knows it will vanish when they make their way back down the stairwell. She savors it while she can. She doesn't think they have anything else they can do when the children die, but drink and cry, and she’s just tired now. Too tired to cry, too tired to drink, to tired to do anything but sit there and talk with him, leaning up against him, spent and used up and feeling cold.

He told her about Moira, who he had loved back home, who had eyes that were green green green like forests. He told her how she had died in a fire, how the building had collapsed on her, had cut her off from the world and then lit her up. "Her own, personal, arena" he says, bitterly, masked by the hum of machines that whir and hiss for twelve perfect apartments. She flinches when he tries to guess who's idea that was.

And then, because she feels safe here, wth him, because he told her his story she tells him her own.

How her mother made sure she understood just how much she had to be grateful for, for a grandfather with money, and a foolish brother who hugged her too tight when the voices in the other room got too loud.

How her father pretended not to see the cuff links he found in the cracks of his sofa.

How the bottles in her parent's medecine cabinet piled up, until she drowned in them at night, and woke, terrified, in the dark.

How when Seneca Crane knocked, her mother made sure she answered, and when he slipped his hand around to the zipper of her favorite dress, she smiled too wide, and let him pull her down.

"He was kind" she muses, watching her wine glass sweat with heat, "He was a kind man"

"He killed people for a living. He thought it was a game" he replies, his voice tight and angry, and she realizes that he still can't see it, that she might not have starved, and she might not have woken every year on that morning in June, hot and cold with terror, but that the make-up and the colors are camouflage. Seneca wanted to create meaning in their deaths, but he cracked once, too much, and so he shattered. She is determined not to shatter.

"You killed people for a living" she says quietly, and he tenses "That was different. I wasn't-they made me into that" But he can see her story in the way she refuses to look at him, in the tilt of her head as the sun reaches it's height.

One time they dance. They are barefoot, shedding clothes in the hot July sun, and he is looking over her shoulder at the buildings, pink and purple and green glass. He sings the song they dance too, his voice low and rasping, falling over the edge of the building, disappearing in the air.

"I like you better like this" he says, as she looks up at him. She is impossibly small without her clothes and wig and he finds it quite scary, suddenly, realizing how easy it would be to hurt her.

"I know" she murmurs "I know" She is too perfect, she knows, little body and perfect wig, never a hair out of place, because less than perfection would never do. She's only human. She has to care somehow, so she bundles them up in colors and cloth, careful never to slip on heels too high to break.

They exist in gentle rhythm, no words spoken as grief washes over them, as he imagines them waking and walking and never turning their heads over their shoulders, never seeing the sun rise, hot and steamy over candy colored glass. They could escape, but as much as he hides his hunger for the past behind the white hot liquor he slips past her in shiny crystal glasses, and small gleaming flasks, she knows that he can not bear to leave this world the way it is now. He survived all those years ago because he cared too much, because without Caesar, everyone would know that he was just a scared little boy who didn't want to hurt anyone.

So they stay and dance in the hot summer sun, her eyes closed, and her head on his shoulder, her in just a slip and him in his undershirt, smearing her chalky white face on his hard, scared shoulder.

"It must be hard to be so lost" she muses as he slips his hand, his hard, calloused hand around her back, and she can feel the warmth and the pressure through her slip, the kind of soft pink that looks like a blush against her skin. Seneca hated slips like this and now she wears them all the time. She wonders at the irony of it, Haymitch seeing her now like this, a gentle wisp of a girl. Ah, well, he had never thought her that strong any way.

"You're hardly one to talk, princess" he mutters, his hands tightening on her waist, and she laughs.

"What's funny?"

"Nothing" she laughs again, burbling up in the gaps between her words, her worlds "I thought you were someone else" This is good enough for him, the man that wakes in the night, hot and sweating, his chest like fire and his thoughts everywhere and anywhere. He knows what loss is, and he sees it in her, she realizes now. He doesn't see it in the rest of them, though it is there, and that makes her feel sparkling, bubbly, little gems of air reaching up from the bottom of a champagne glass.

"Did you think they would last long this year?"she asks conversationally, already knowing he will tense against her, and then, with that tight voice he only ever uses when she asks about the children, he will say he didn't believe so, didn't believe in them.

"No" he replies tersely. It's alright, though. She didn't believe much in them either. The girl had looked hungry and scared, her eyes too wide for her face, and the boy too rash, too proud. He had fire in his blood, but the girl made him weak. He had not known her, but he had taken the spear that sprouted from his chest so she could shrink, a weeping girl, tears tracing pale streaks on her dirty face. They had both known.

"He died well" she comments, pressing her head against his neck. He smells of sweat and something sharp. Probably whiskey, she realizes.

"You can't die well" He responds, and she's made him angry, so she nods silently into his neck, whispers an apology. She whispers apologies at him constantly, but only here, where the hiss of industrial dreams covers up her words does she press her mouth against his shoulder, write the apology on his skin. The red red red of her lipstick looks small and sad against his skin, and she feels small and sad, and wonders if this is how he felt when he came home, the conquering hero, to a girl on fire and a brother who put a gun against the back of his mouth when their mother died at Peacekeeper hands.

 

One year, after Snow falls, he takes her out behind District Twelve, intent on showing her the lake. The lake where everyone else watched their home burn. It is cool, and blue, and she dips her toes, but doesn't get in because her lungs ache when she pushes too far into the water, and she still takes sponge baths. He dives in anyway, completely naked and happy in a way she's never seen before. She thinks that maybe it's the lake, but then she sees him turn to look for a girl who's been dead for twenty years, and her lungs burn again. The smile falters, fades, and he's back to himself again, a little bitter and angry and frayed at the edges. She feels safer with him like that, and then feels a stab of guilt for cherishing his unhappiness. But Effie remembers the way he spoke of her eyes, green green green, and she can not help the curling tendrils of jealousy that clench in her stomach, even though they only live together because the bubblegum pink apartment felt cold and disjointed when she came back from the white rooms with cruel men.

They don't talk about it, but she thinks they might be friends.

He's singing, and with a jolt she recognizes it as the song they danced to at dawn in air that smelled faintly of jasmine, the taste of imagined blood, metallic in her mouth, with the July sun rising above them, his hand on her back, curving against her and turning her warm. He comes from the water, droplets streaming of his body, and pulls on his rough pants-Seam pants that he still wears.

"You're dress is pretty" he says, and even though he says it to her everyday, she knows what it means. It means the sundress makes him think of his mother, who loved flowers, but wildflowers, never roses or lilies or orchids. The dress is covered in daises and clover flowers, white and blue, and she feels like the sky in it.

"Thank you" she says, her voice still raspy and rough around the edges, from last night's terror, the nightmare that woke her to find her in a room dark and warm and nothing like the cold feel of the industrial white that she sees in her dreams. She leans up against him, and he tilts his head back. He still smells slightly of whiskey, but he doesn't get the kind of drunk that scares her anymore. He still has as much to forget, but she thinks he might have more to remember now, with Katniss and Peeta next door with a baby girl that he loves and a book with Moira's eyes in it, green green green like a forest. "The lake is nice"she says, and she means it, even though the water scares her and he came here for a different girl the sun feels warm on her body, the kind of warm where the heat comes tingling up from beneath her skin. She thinks of all those nights after the children had died, or when the children were dying, thinks of Maysilee and the birds. She thinks of the way she used to yell at him for drinking. She doesn't anymore, but he seems to have slowed down anyway. "I used to come here with her" He clenches his jaw, and she rests her fingers on the muscle there, fingers with nails still too short and never painted, because they were torn out on the third week in her cell. They look small beside him and she wonders if it even helps that she rests her head on his shoulder, curled up against him, but he grabs her hand and holds it, and rests her head on top of hers and she thinks maybe she is some good in this world where they both scream at night and he clutches a knife and she clutches him, the man who feels like safety. "I know"she says, her eyes closing, and they sit there in a silence that tastes like hope.


End file.
